Rednek Wine Glasses resonate

NEWPORT NEWS, Va. - Okie Morris is as spunky and offbeat as her latest creation: the Original Rednek Wine Glass.

NEWPORT NEWS, Va. — Okie Morris is as spunky and offbeat as her latest creation: the Original Rednek Wine Glass.

Packing boxes of glasses for delivery to local retail customers, she laughs about the thousands of glasses selling nationwide and the newspaper, online and TV stories documenting her sudden success.

“My purpose is to repurpose,” says Okie, 43.

“It all started with my business Rewined Designs in 2009.”

Although the Newport News, Va., resident routinely remakes thrift-store items such as a chandelier into a hanging bird feeder and a mail rack into a small tool holder, the quirky wineglasses launched her into the national spotlight.

A recent story by CNN.com calls her glass design — a Mason jar glued on top of a Libbey candlestick holder — part of “America’s love affair with the irreverent, tacky and politically incorrect.”

“You’ve got to have fun in life, and I love having fun,” she says.

Last year, Carson Home Accents in Freeport, Pa., started manufacturing and selling the wineglasses after a salesman saw the item on a shelf in a Hallmark store. The company signed a licensing deal with Morris.

Within a couple of months, the company had orders for almost 100,000 and had to staff special shifts just to get them out the door.

During holiday shopping, the wineglasses were No. 1 on the Amazon.com best-seller list for glassware and drinking items, stories about her success said.

News reports also said the glasses have garnered $5?million in sales, but Morris disputes that claim and says she’s not anywhere close to being the millionaire that people might expect.

Working out of a 10-by-10-foot studio located at the back of a restaurant parking lot in Yorktown, Va., Morris gets repurposed products ready for a Sustainable Living Fair on Feb.?18-19 at the Webb Center at Old Dominion University. She loves birds and has her building surrounded with small bird feeders made from terra cotta cups. For the fair, she’s making small birdbaths out of old vases and pottery saucers.

A small log she found in the woods is drilled with holes and given a wire hanger so it can serve as a suet or peanut butter feeder for woodpeckers.

“I’m a bird fanatic, and anything to do with birds excites me,” she says.

Anything creative excites Morris. Her small workshop is nothing but paint, glitter, old vases, pottery pieces and glass marbles.

Rednek Wine Charms fashioned from bottle caps painted neon green, pink and black are her next creation. She has big tubes of beer-flavored Rednek Lip Balm in the works.

“Necessity is the mother of invention,” she says, pulling out some lip balm.

“I create best when I need something, and those small tubes of lip balm aren’t enough for me, so I came up with the idea for oversize tubes.”